“Let’s try this again,” Miles said. “Please sit down.” He gestured at an empty couch.
“It smells like a dispensary in here,” she said. “Or, like, a home for people with glaucoma.”
“I know. It’s stupid.” He got up, opened a window, and waved his hand a few times as if that would help.
She walked over and sat.
“Look, we know about The List,” Ian said. “But we’re not part of it. They don’t even let you vote on it till you’re an upperclassman.”
“‘Let you’?” Joey said.
Ian showed his palms. “I don’t want to anyway. A lot of us don’t.”
“Then why are you in a frat ironically named Alphas?”
“First of all, it’s a fraternity. And second, we like the … I don’t know. Brotherhood.”
“I realize it sounds lame,” Miles said. “But there are a lot of good guys in here. And some of us have girlfriends who are too smart to let us get away with being like that, you know?”
“The List started here.”
“I’m not gonna lie,” Ian said. “Some of the older guys are dicks. But hey, different generation.” He smiled a goofy smile.
She didn’t smile back.
“It’s like anywhere,” Miles said. “Pick a sports team, a club. The friggin’ math club, even. Anywhere you go, any group you join, some people are assholes.”
“And it’s not like girls are perfect,” Ian said. “First week of school? This one bitch in biochem took pictures of me when I fell asleep and posted them on Insta.”
“Aw.” Joey made a sad face. “You should probably roofie her to get revenge.”
He looked genuinely upset. “Why would you say something like that?”
Now she felt bad. Here she was: In the middle of the frat house that had originated The List, and she was the asshole.
“Look,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s okay,” Ian said. “But we get so much shit about belonging here. Everyone’s trying to figure it out, fit in. You have—” He caught himself.
Joey said, “What?” And she said it hard.
“Brains is what you have, right? And attitude. And … well, I don’t mean it in an objectifying way, but look at yourself.” He mumbled the last. “And some of the guys here? They just have looks. And girls like them. So that’s what they’ll use. You can’t blame them. Everyone goes with their strengths. It’s like the nerdy kids being condescending about dipshit athletes or whatever.”
“But I do blame them,” Joey said. “No football player ever jumped to his death ’cuz a dork insulted his IQ.”
“Is that…?” Miles leaned back.
“Rebecca Morgan was…?” Ian rubbed his eyes. “That was because of The List?”
“Yeah,” Joey said. “It was the precipitating factor at least. Though one of your ‘brothers’ was kind enough to point out that other factors go into a girl hurling herself off the seventh floor of a building.”
Neither of them would meet her eyes.
“Look, I get it. You’re not all part of The List.” She stood up, walked over to the charging station, and unplugged her phone. “But you didn’t do anything to stop it either.”
She walked back downstairs, stepping over Mr. Insight, still passed out across the bottom step.
The party was getting going now, the beer pong hall a churn of body heat, thrumming music, strobe lights, and the reek of beer. A group of girls came in crowded together as if to fit under an umbrella. Done hair, wobbly on white high heels, plucking down the edges of their miniskirts with gel nails.
Joey never understood it, how guys didn’t see through it all.
The one working her sleek brown hair and boobs crammed painfully into a spandex camisole to distract from her big nose.
The one who used a concealer and matte bronzer to hide her tech neck, and cat-eye glasses to balance out her round face.
The one in a high-waisted skirt wearing a cropped jacket to make up for her short legs.
It was so obvious, so fake.
And yet all that most guys saw were: tits, asses, legs.
They didn’t get that girls were just people like them. That everyone was imperfect and working so hard to not be.
And then she thought of the shame cycle that had hit her on her yoga mat. Not-really-crying afterward in the shower. How dumb and bitchy she was to Forrest when he was only trying to help.
How imperfect she was and how hard she worked to not be.
She moved past the girls, breezing through a cloud of sugary perfume, and sliced through the crowd. Everyone dancing and drinking, the girls whipping sweat-drenched hair back and forth, guys pounding beer. It looked totally inane and completely fun at the same time. But she knew that the part of her that saw it as totally inane would never allow the other part of her to just let go into the fun, and that made her feel about as lonely as anything had since she’d gotten to Los Angeles.
The foyer was less crowded, folks streaming in and out. She’d just stepped out onto the covered porch when someone yelled, “Hey! Jennifer!”
She knew that it was directed at her.
As she turned, Brayden Oakley filled ninety percent of her visual field. He was huge, charging at her angrily as if he’d forgotten he wasn’t on a football field. For a moment she thought he was going to strike her.
“You little bitch. Chad said you snuck in here to harass him about that girl who killed herself. Like somehow it’s our fault.”
“Only partially,” she said.
“That’s such whiny snowflake bullshit,” he said, looming closer.
A small crowd gathered, folks standing at a distance on the front lawn, watching the confrontation. A homeless guy even rubbernecked down on the sidewalk, hands resting on his cart, hat low over his eyes. A stoner by the broken porch swing paused in mid-chew, burrito raised mostly to his mouth.
Dinner and a show.
She turned to leave, but Brayden shoved past her and blocked her way down the stairs. The crowd pressed in a little. It was dark here on the covered porch. No moonlight. No stars.
Someone said, “No way.”
Someone else said, “Daaaaang!”
Brayden was breathing hard, his face red. “Even if there was a list—which there’s not—that’s just how the world works. People have opinions. Guys are guys. It’s a free fucking marketplace of ideas. And there are laws and rules to protect shit like that. The First Amendment. You can’t just change everything and get in everyone’s business because some girl is sensitive.”
Her face came up to the middle of his chest, and she had to tilt her head back to look at him. She could feel his exhalation across her face. She saw the pulse of his heartbeat in his neck, thought about the pressure of the blood moving through his carotid, enough to hit the low ceiling if she opened it up.
“Know what?” she said. “Those are valid points. So I’ll have to consider closely how to do it.”
“How to do what?”
“How to make you pay.”
She moved to step around him, and he moved with her. There were a bunch of brothers at his back. He was so much bigger than her—or anyone else.
She took a deep breath, lifted her gaze, mustered her inner Orphan X. “I want you to look at me,” she said. “Look at me closely. And ask yourself: Do I look like someone you can intimidate?”
He lowered his nose close to hers and returned her glare. There was a masculine rage in his eyes she had seen before but still didn’t understand.
“Brayden, cut it out,” one of the fraternity guys said behind him.
Another chimed in, “Let her go.”
“Yeah—cut the shit, Oakley. Let her leave if she wants to.”
Brayden straightened back up. Bared his teeth at her. “We’re not done.”
He stepped aside.
Joey held his eyes, looking right into the hatred. “No,” she said. “We’re not.”
She walked past him.
Juice jacking.
That’s what it’s called when you infiltrate a charging station by swapping out gear—in this case, the USB cables—to introduce malware.
Then, when unsuspecting little frat boys come along to charge their phones so they can, say, log in to their Google Docs and rank girls’ titties like pathetic little boy-bros, you can jack their passwords and account info.
And then you’re inside their lives.
Like they got inside Rebecca Morgan’s.
It took about three weeks before Joey had what she needed, accessing all twenty-seven phones of the twenty-seven predacious douchenozzles who had decided to weigh in on The List.
Joey chewed Red Vines now and clattered away on her keyboard. Dog the dog came over and nudged at her until she gave him a bite of Red Vine. He chewed it, jaws slapping like his head was hinged in the back, his nose crinkling up and the lines in his forehead furrowing adorably.
“We’re gonna sink these guys,” she told him.
He smacked away, trying to get Red Vine gunk off his molars.
“But we gotta do it fairly,” she said. “Because as Ayatollah Bro-meini said, ‘It’s a free fucking marketplace. And there are laws and rules that protect shit like that.’”
Dog cocked his head and whined. He wanted more Red Vine, but she had to be a responsible parent and wait to feed him his powdered chicken-and-quinoa dog food that cost a billion dollars but kept him from getting yeast in his ears. Purebreds were so high-maintenance. Like X. If you really want to get a job done, give it to a mutt like Joey. She didn’t need no fish-and-rice, quinoa-and-chicken diet. She could do anything powered on Dr Pepper and Red Vines and look awesome doing it.
“So,” she said. “I decided to play by the rules.”
Dog sat, bent into a kidney shape, and pawed behind his ear. He looked disinterested.
“If talking misogynistic shit and being a blue-chip asshole isn’t technically forbidden, do you know what is?”
Dog walked out of her workstation and flopped down onto his padded bed with a grunt.
She was undeterred. “Plagiarism,” she told him. “And since everyone e-submits their papers through the UNEX Student Portal, that means that this guy”—she jacked her thumbs inward—“can retrieve them all with a simple click of her delicate hands.”
Dog lifted his head sideways from his sprawl, his collar jangling. One of his jowls was hanging open, connecting his mouth to the floor with a cord of drool.
“Then, with the benefit of some basic plagiarism-detection software—”
Dog got up and whined to be taken out.
“You should be basking in the glory of my genius,” she said. “Not just waiting to pee.”
He scratched at the door.
She took him out. He took an Austin Powers leak on the strip of lawn in front of her apartment building. Dead spots browned the grass at intervals, residue of Dog’s performances past.
When the other neighbors complained, she told them she thought they were mini alien crop circles.
He finished, and she fed him a freeze-dried liver treat, and he slobbered it up like she was serving him a center-cut filet mignon.
Then she went back inside.
She gathered all her evidence.
And put it in a spreadsheet.
Just like the one that helped kill Rebecca Morgan.
* * *
FRATERNITY SCANDAL ROCKS UCLA.
Alphas Turn Beta.
27 Expelled in Plagiarism Scandal.
The news headlines in the Daily Bruin did not disappoint.
They were gone, and Becca was avenged—at least as avenged as she could ever be—and Joey had done it fair and square.
Or at least fairish and squarish.
She’d gotten back to her classes and her routine, and X had stopped asking to have sushi with her every thirty seconds like some insecure shunned-uncle person, except now that he’d backed off, she sort of missed him—but he never needed to know that.
Tonight she’d worked late at the study lounge at the Union, trying to figure out if she could predict protein-protein interactions based only on 3-D X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy or if she’d have to break into a lab to perform a few interaction experiments. It was so lame that they were making her finish this stupid undergraduate degree instead of just making her a tenured professor and letting her bring the department into the twenty-first century.
But: academic bureaucracy.
She stuffed her computational notebooks into her rucksack and headed out into the crisp night.
The plaza was bare at this hour, except for a few strolling students and the obligatory tourist photographing the Bruin bear statue, a life-size bronze rendering of the school mascot.
Passing by, she admired the massive back paw that students had rubbed shiny for good luck. At first she didn’t notice the two figures approaching from the direction of the Wooden Center.
They came up on her fast.
Chad Chassman and Brayden Oakley.
She summoned a smile. “Haven’t seen you guys around yoga lately.”
“You fucking bitch,” Chad said.
They spread out a bit, so she had to hold one of them in her peripheral vision.
“We need to work on your vocabulary,” she said. “If you ever hope to get back into college. ‘Fucking bitch’ is like your drunk uncle’s version of sexist talk. You need a modern variation. Like ‘douchebaguete.’ Or ‘sausage masseuse.’”
Chad stepped forward, grabbed her shoulders with both hands. And squeezed.
“Let go of me,” she said.
“Not until you hear what I—”
She bladed her hands and swept them inside the bars of his forearms, a rising prayer motion that knocked his arms loose. She flung her own arms back, letting the rucksack slide from her shoulders. As it hit the ground behind her, Chad fisted her collar, pulling her shirt roughly up toward her chin.
She pistoned her knee high and hammered her heel forward into his instep. The stomp kick used her strongest muscles—butt and thighs—making up for the weight differential. Sure enough, his foot rolled and she heard the pleasing crackle of tearing ligaments.
Grunting, Chad listed to the side, trying to claw at her cheek, but she swept his arm aside with an uppercut deviation, using her hips for the pivot.
He reeled back on his heels, and she lunged into a head butt, shattering his pretty-boy nose.
Brayden grabbed her from behind, bear-hugging her and yanking her off the ground. His powerful chest pressed into her shoulder blades, his biceps wide like tree branches. Instead of kicking she pulled her knees into her chest hard and flung herself up, as if doing a backflip from a diving board.
The shift in momentum caught him off guard, and he stumbled back, releasing her to keep his balance. She rolled up and over his shoulder, landing behind him on her feet, setting her base.
He drew himself up as if off a football snap, arms wide, hands clawed, his face a mask of fury.
Before he could close in, she summoned every bit of strength she had, minding her weight transfer on the pivot of her hips, and delivered a palm strike to his solar plexus.
Soft tissue, less likely to break her knuckles.
Even so, she heard a rib crack. Not hers.
Brayden doubled over, his diaphragm in spasm, nerve clusters knotting up.
His face purpled. He clutched at his throat. No breath coming in or coming out.
She thought about Rebecca Morgan. That last awful screech of air. The glistening shiv of the femur bone bared to the world. How her eyes had rolled like a panicked horse’s. And then how they’d stopped.
Joey wound up and kicked Braydon as hard as she could in the crotch.
She was wearing steel-toed Doc Martens, so it was plenty hard.
Like testicular-rupture hard.
She turned around before he fell just to be badass like dudes in movies when they let
shit explode behind them.
But she didn’t hear him fall.
So she whipped back around a bit nervously.
Then he fell.
The two of them shuddered on the ground, holding their parts.
Now she could leave.
She pivoted to catch the tourist looking, the camera lowered from his face. She realized something about his bearing was familiar, though it took a second for her to realize it was—
“X!” She came at him angrily. “What the actual hell?”
“I was just keeping an eye on you,” he said.
Behind them the expelled frat boys moaned and coughed.
He started walking off, but she was hard on his heels.
“Wait a minute.…” She looked down at her skull bracelet, tore it off. “Is this…? Did you chip me?”
“That’s not the precise phrasing I would use.”
She threw it onto the concrete walk. “I can’t believe you were spying on me.”
He was keeping a half pace ahead with his stupid long legs. “I know. It’s hard to believe that I, a spy, would spy on you.”
They headed down the tree-lined walkway toward Strathmore. She was furious, her thoughts twirling as she Sixth Sensed the past few weeks.
“And hang on—the window washer!—you were watching when I was on the roof of the parking structure with my binoculars!”
“You know Steiners have better optics. They’re built to milspec demands—”
“Would you just not right now!”
Campus was quiet, the air tinged with the scent of eucalyptus. Distant traffic from the Village gave a pleasing white-noise rush. But she didn’t feel peaceful.
“And outside Alpha Nu Upsilon?” Joey said, hating the high pitch of her voice. “The hobo with the shopping cart?”
“I believe the proper term is ‘domicile-challenged.’”
“That was you?”
“A gentleman never reveals his tradecraft.”
“X! You never let me do anything! My first … dunno … mission, and you have to make it about you.”
“I was just there in case you needed backup.”
“If I need backup, I’ll ask for it,” she said. “I don’t need you all white-knighting me just ’cuz I’m a girl.”
The List Page 3
